Maryland Sound International and HARMAN Provide Stellar Sound at New Jersey’s First-Ever Orion Music + More Festival

Maryland Sound International and HARMAN Provide Stellar Sound at New Jersey’s First-Ever Orion Music + More Festival

Monday, January 14, 2013 3:04:43 PM America/New_York

NORTHRIDGE, California -- The 2-day Orion Music + More Festival, held at Bader Field in Atlantic City, New Jersey, featured a host of major acts on four stages including Arctic Monkeys, Avenged Sevenfold, Cage the Elephant, Modest Mouse, Baroness and more than 20 other bands, capped by Metallica performing their pivotal Ride the Lightning and Metallic albums in their entirety on successive nights. More than 64,000 attendees enjoyed hearing their favorite bands through a HARMAN sound system that included JBL VTX and VERTEC® line arrays, Crown I-Tech HD amplifiers and Soundcraft Vi6 digital mixing consoles.

Maryland Sound International, a Baltimore-based production company with more than 45 years experience in sound contracting for major events, provided the audio system for one of the main stages. The loudspeaker complement included 14 of JBL’s new VTX V25 line array elements and 12 JBL VERTEC VT4888 midsize line array elements at each side of the stage, along with 12 VT4880A fullsize arrayable subwoofers. Six VERTEC VT4889 fullsize line array elements were deployed at each side of the stage for out fill, and four VT4887’s were used for front fill.

In addition, VT4889 line array elements and VT4888’s were utilized as stage monitors, with a pair of VT4881A arrayable subwoofers placed around the drums to provide added low-end monitoring. The loudspeakers were driven by 80 Crown Crown IT12000HD power amplifiers—70 for the main system and 10 to power the onstage monitor speakers. Two Soundcraft Vi6 digital consoles handled front of house and monitor mixing. Leiter and the MSI crew employed HARMAN HiQnet Performance Manager™ software to set up and tune the system.

“The Orion Music + More Festival gave us a great opportunity to use the new JBL V25 line arrays in a large-concert outdoor setting,” said Jeremiah Leiter, General Manager at Maryland Sound. “We purchased the V25’s because we’re committed to providing the very best when the audience matters—when they’re listening to the bands they’re passionate about.”

Like most multi-band festival situations, there wasn’t a lot of time for setup between bands, which made the superior sound quality of the V25 and the VERTEC line arrays a key factor. “Most of the bands only had time to do a line check and not a full sound check, so we couldn’t go crazy with tweaking EQs and settings for every vocalist and instrument,” Leiter continued. “Although most of the bands only needed about 20 inputs and that helped speed up set changes, still, the line arrays had a flat-enough response that we were able to quickly dial in the sound of every band and performer without having to make radical adjustments at the board.”

Leiter also noted the improved installation features of the VTX Series. “The V25 is much easier to move into place and rig,” he said. “The dolly system used for transport is more secure and the built-in rigging hardware makes it faster and smpler to fly the speakers. Also, Performance Manager almost makes configuring the system idiot-proof.”

In addition, a number of different front of house engineers used the Soundcraft Vi6 consoles and they were all very comfortable with the board. “In fact, some of them brought their own Vi6 file settings on a USB drive and loaded them in,” Leiter noted.

“We were all pretty knocked out by the sound,” Leiter said. “The bands were extremely pleased. Also, a lot of other audio professionals came around to our stage to check it out. We really created a buzz—with no exaggeration, it only took about 15 minutes after the first act went on for people to come by to listen and ask about why our stage sounded so good.”

HARMAN (www.harman.com) designs, manufactures and markets a wide range of audio and infotainment solutions for the automotive, consumer and professional markets — supported by 15 leading brands, including AKG®, Harman Kardon®, Infinity®, JBL®, Lexicon® and Mark Levinson®. The Company is admired by audiophiles across multiple generations and supports leading professional entertainers and the venues where they perform. More than 25 million automobiles on the road today are equipped with HARMAN audio and infotainment systems. HARMAN has a workforce of about 13,900 people across the Americas, Europe and Asia, and reported net sales of $4.4 billion for year ended June 30, 2012.